1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to wireless communication systems and, more particularly, to a system and method of optimizing data transmission between a gateway and a mobile station.
2. Description of the Related Art
Remote communication with individuals has become increasingly important in a mobile society. Early versions of wireless devices transmitted a signal to a paging device worn by the user. The paging device did little more than provide a beep indicating that a message had been sent to the user. The user must then call a telephone number to receive the actual message. These early paging devices were replaced with text messaging devices that include a small display that permits the transmission of a text message, such as the message sender""s telephone number. While the text messaging device provided additional data to the user, the user still had to use a separate telephone to contact the message sender, or to take action in accordance with the message.
With the advent of wireless communications networks, a user can simply call any telephone number on his cellular phone from virtually anywhere and once connected, speak directly to another party. Some cellular xe2x80x9cphonesxe2x80x9d are even capable of transmitting and receiving data through an air link. These xe2x80x9cphones,xe2x80x9d more properly named as mobile stations, operate as mobile terminals have features similar to those of desktop computer terminals, features such as, for example, the ability to access stock quotes, weather, and e-mail messages through the Internet. Typical mobile stations, however, have less powerful processors and memories than those of desktop terminals because they have severe size and power consumption constraints. The amount of data and the reliability of data transmission are also limited by the available spectrum, i.e., the radio resources allotted to the mobile station.
The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) has been developed to deal with these severe constraints imposed on the mobile stations. In accordance with WAP, resources retrieved from the Internet are encoded by a gateway server into a compact binary format (e.g., Wireless Markup Language (WML) or WMLScript) and the mobile station, more particularly, the user agent of the mobile station decodes the bytecodes for presentation to the user. However, the encoding methods defined by WAP do not adequately reduce the amount of data transmitted to the mobile stations, thereby unnecessarily consuming valuable radio resources in the wireless network.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and a method that facilitates more effective usage of the radio resources while a mobile station communicates with a web server.
An object of the present invention is to provide a low-cost method and system for minimizing the data transmitted between a mobile station and a web or origin server.
According to an aspect of the invention, prior to transmission to a mobile station, data is first encoded according to the Wireless Application Protocol and then compressed using a conventional compression algorithm. Upon receiving the compressed data, the mobile station decompresses the compressed data and then decodes the decompressed data according to the Wireless Application Protocol for presentation to a user.
According to another aspect of the invention, the User Agent Profile (UAProf) includes data indicating the extended decompression capabilities of the mobile station and is sent to the gateway server. If the mobile station supports decompression, the WAP encoded data is compressed prior to their transmission to the mobile station. If not, the WAP encoded data is transmitted without compression.
In one embodiment, data is transmitted from a web server in accordance with a first protocol to a gateway in response to a request from a mobile station. The gateway encodes the data from the web server into bytecodes in accordance with a second protocol and compresses the bytecodes using a compression algorithm. The compressed bytecodes are then transmitted to the mobile station. The mobile station receives the compressed bytecodes and decompresses the compressed bytecodes using a decompression algorithm. The decompressed bytecodes are decoded in accordance with the second protocol for presentation to a user.
In another embodiment, data is transmitted from a web server in accordance with a first protocol to the gateway in response to a request from the mobile station. The gateway encodes the data from the web server into bytecodes in accordance with a second protocol. The encoded data are sent to the mobile station if the bytecodes are of a size less than a predetermined size. The gateway compresses the bytecodes using a compression algorithm when the bytecodes are of a size at least as great as the predetermined size. The compressed bytecodes are transmitted to the mobile station. The mobile station receives the compressed bytecodes and decompresses the compressed bytecodes using a decompression algorithm. The decompressed bytecodes are then decoded in accordance with the second protocol.
Other objects and features of the present invention will become apparent from the following detailed description considered in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. It is to be understood, however, that the drawings are designed solely for purposes of illustration and not as a definition of the limits of the invention, for which reference should be made to the appended claims. It should be further understood that the drawings are not necessarily drawn to scale and that, unless otherwise indicated, they are merely intended to conceptually illustrate the structures and procedures described herein.